So anyway,

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Sunday, 9 October 2016

The Severed Streets is Paul Cornell's second Shadow Police novel, his
urban fantasy series about a small team of London police who've been gifted/cursed
with a form of second sight that only works within the boundaries of London (or, it
turns out, selected other cities around the world.) This installment has a backdrop
of political unrest and riots, as a supernatural figure that seems to be emulating
Jack the Ripper starts to wreak havoc, but twisting the Ripper's MO to actually only
kill men. It's strong but very dark, which may be one reason it took me a
while to get through - the political metaphor is clear and this is a very angry book
that takes a lot of frustration out on its characters. Its bleak nature made it hard
to pick up sometimes, especially when reading it at a time when the situation is
even worse than the one a couple of years ago that Cornell is railing against.

The other very contentious issue with this particular book is a little in-joke that
goes way too far. In a novel where a number of characters have very obvious
real-life counterparts, it's a good gag to have a knowing reference to a famous
fantasy author being part of London's supernatural subculture, and then turn round
at the end of the paragraph and state outright that it's Neil Gaiman. To then have
that cameo expand and just keep on getting bigger until Gaiman ends up having
massive plot significance just feels really indulgent.

So it's a shame the one touch of levity is a smug one that takes you out of the
story, but it's an interesting enough world that I probably won't be giving up on it
just yet, although I hope the next book in the series features a bit more actual
escapism in its fantasy.

Monday, 5 September 2016

It's been a long time since I read any of the newer official James Bond novels,
written by a variety of novelists commissioned by the Ian Fleming estate; not since
Sebastian Faulks' effort, of which I don't really remember the actual novel much,
but do remember his afterword in which he says he's basically too good to be
writing James Bond books, but it's all right 'cause he likes doing pastiche and just
farted this one out on his coffee break (IIRC it showed.) That's probably what's put
me off the other official novels, but as with most things it was some of them coming
up cheap on kindle that made me give them another go. And Jeffery "two ways to spell
Jeffrey weren't enough for me" Deaver does at least seem to have been flattered to
be asked rather than mildly offended.

Monday, 25 July 2016

As I like to do every year or two, I've gone back to Arthur Conan Doyle's
Sherlock Holmes stories in my collection of the complete works; Volume 3
includes one collection of short stories and the final full-length novel: The
Return of Sherlock Holmes starts with "The Adventure of the Empty House," which
as the title of the collection suggests sees Holmes return from the "dead" in a
typically low-key way, and explain how he faked his own death so he could get rid of
Moriarty's crime ring while they thought he was safely out of the way. I do generally enjoy the short
stories more than the novels, and this is quite a good little collection of them,
with a couple of grisly cases and one or two I'm not sure I've actually read before.
I did like moments in these like a client asking Holmes and Watson if he can have a
glass of milk and a biscuit to calm his nerves, or the couple of times where Holmes
to all intents and purposes tells Watson not to be so racist.

Holmes' supposed death must have got Conan Doyle's audience really interested in the
shady Professor Moriarty as well, because he crops up a lot more after his own death
than he ever did before it, so despite having revived Holmes a lot of stories go
back to before the Reichenbach Falls: The final novel The Valley of Fear
feels like an instance of Moriarty being crowbarred into an unrelated story, which
is enjoyable enough but does go back to the clunky storytelling device of A Study in Scarlet - Holmes solving the mystery in the first half of the novel with
information the reader doesn't have, then a second half flashing back to events in
America that led up to the crime. It's pulled off better here than in the debut
novel - the flashback itself is more cleverly constructed - but it still feels like
a bit of a cheat of a narrative device.

Wednesday, 29 June 2016

Paul Cornell's author bio mentions the many different media he's written (and won
awards) for, including TV and a couple of the most popular episodes of the revived
Doctor Who (but nothing for some years now.) It does make me wonder if
Witches of Lychford wasn't originally envisaged as a book, because by its end
it does feel like you've just watched the pilot for a supernatural TV show. It's not
just the fact that it mostly establishes a setting and characters for further
stories - and there is already another book in the series - but also the fact
that it's so short. It basically has time to introduce its central mismatched trio -
a witch, a vicar and an atheist-turned-occultist - and its location of Lychford, a
village that's a weak spot between supernatural dimensions. The three women get to
form an uneasy alliance and fight off their first challenge, the proposal of a
supermarket whose building would destroy the occult protections against invasion
from other realms. It's certainly mainly setup for "more adventures to come..." and
it's, unsurprisingly, well-written with well-drawn characters, so I will look
out for those further adventures, but much as I like a quick read I hope we get the
chance for something a bit more intricate than a novella next
time.

Sunday, 26 June 2016

I enjoyed The Boy From Reactor 4 enough to give Orest Stelmach's follow-up a
chance - The Boy Who Stole From The Dead is the second of his Nadia Tesla
series, in which the Ukrainian-American heroine is now the legal guardian of teenage
hockey player Bobby, who's actually her illegal immigrant cousin from Chernobyl.
This time Bobby is accused of murder, and her attempts to clear his name without
revealing his true identity see Nadia returning to Ukraine again. The story's
resolution takes a much more extreme turn than I was expecting but Stelmach just
about pulls it off, while setting up an even bigger conspiracy for the third in what
now seems to be a trilogy.

Monday, 6 June 2016

A very quick word about All My Friends are Superheroes because it's a very short book. Andrew Kaufman's novella is a little fable about people defining themselves by a single personality trait, framed in a love story in which the narrator's superhero wife has been hypnotized into not being able to see him; he has until the end of a flight to Toronto to make himself visible again before she forgets him entirely. It's a bit self-consciously quirky but likeable all the same.

Thursday, 2 June 2016

Somewhere in the blurb for Sergei Lukyanenko's The New Watch I'm sure I saw
it described as the final book in the Night Watch pentalogy; I think that
makes it the third consecutive "final book in the series," following the "final book
in the trilogy" and the "sequel to the trilogy." So I'm not too surprised to see
that yes, a sixth novel is due in September.

Still, I enjoy Lukyanenko's supernatural thrillers about the Others, the sub-species
of humans with magical abilities split into Dark and Light categories with an uneasy
truce that states that each action made by one side means the other is allowed to do
something of equal but opposite influence. In The New Watch, the Light
magician Anton discovers a boy with prophetic powers, something which opens up a
whole new (and at times, unnecessarily complicated) area of the books' mythology as
there are unbreakable rules surrounding the first, biggest prophecy any Prophet
makes, except it turns out nobody's actually sure what they are. It's a bit
obviously milking a concept that was originally meant to run a lot shorter, but at
the same time I still like the way the books have a three-act structure in which
seemingly unrelated events build up to a sudden climax.

Sunday, 22 May 2016

As the internet makes people feel free to express ever more extreme opinions about
each other, extreme ways might be needed to police their behaviour. The solution in
James Goss' comedy-thriller Haterz takes no prisoners - the narrator is a
serial killer targeting trolls and anyone else who makes the internet a worse place.
He starts more or less by accident, slipping peanuts to the allergic girlfriend of
his friend, who uses Facebook to passive-aggressively make people's lives a misery.
But it catches the attention of a mysterious conspiracy he calls The Killuminati,
who finance him to get rid of trolls who threaten violence to random women, charity
scammers and teenage pop fans who try to bully others into suicide.

I really enjoyed Haterz, which doesn't stick just to black comedy but also
sees the narrator get more subtle in his revenge on characters who bear a certain
resemblance to real people: A self-pitying columnist who lives in the country,
slagging off her neighbours and ex-husband in her articles, gets her comeuppance
when he turns her into a nice person, thereby ruining her career. It does look for a
while as if the story's impetus is running out, but Goss salvages it with a couple
of twists about who's been behind his mysterious funders.

Monday, 9 May 2016

Something of a prequel to George R. R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire
series, A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms takes place in his fictional world of
Westeros about 100 years before the events of A Game of Thrones, and collects
three novellas Martin had previously published separately about Dunk and Egg. The
former is a hedge knight - a wandering knight who doesn't owe allegiance to any
particular house or lord - and the latter his 11-year-old squire, but secretly a
prince of the ruling Targaryen family. Compared to the intrigues of the main novels
these prequels are pretty straightforward - Dunk earns his spurs at a tournament,
helps an elderly knight fend off his aggressive neighbour, and then gets caught up
in a political plot at another tournament - and not quite as full of gratuitous sex
and violence (I mean, loads of people die, several horses come to a sticky end and
someone's brains fall out, but I did say this was in comparison to A Song
of Ice and Fire.) It's kind of like a violent fairytale, enjoyable but Martin's
claim in the epilogue that many more Dunk and Egg stories will follow might be a bit
optimistic, given the speed at which he writes.

Sunday, 17 April 2016

This year's Thorne thriller by Mark Billingham sees Tom Thorne and his partner Helen go on holiday; but instead of the old cliché about a detective going on holiday and stumbling across a crime, Thorne and Helen deliberately interrupt theirs to seek one out, when they hear of a serial killer of teenage girls in the Warwickshire town where she grew up. Specifically, the prime suspect is the husband of one of Helen's old school friends, so they go to lend some support - although why exactly she suddenly feels so responsible for someone she hasn't spoken to since she left town is one of the novel's mysteries.

The other one is who the real killer is, because Thorne becomes convinced the police have the wrong man - as the title suggests, there's something about the Time of Death that bugs him. So we're back to a bit more of a conventional detective story although this time the police are far from welcoming Thorne's help. I like how we've now got to the stage where Billingham focuses almost as much on Helen - whom he introduced in her own story a few years ago before bringing her to the main series - as he does on Thorne, giving the story two different points of view. And this one has a clock-ticking dénouement that had me really anxious reading it.

Tuesday, 29 March 2016

In a brief change from the fiction I usually read, another of James Shapiro's
histories of the events that influenced Shakespeare's writing. After 1599, we
get 1606: William Shakespeare and the Year of Lear, with the plays that
premiered that year being King Lear, Macbeth and Antony and
Cleopatra. There's lots of outside elements big and small that seem to be
reflected in those plays but inevitably most of them come back to the Gunpowder Plot
of the previous year. I knew that Macbeth carried a lot of echoes of that,
but Shapiro also finds possible links in King Lear, which would probably have
been written by November 1605, but might have had amendments before it reached the
stage, acknowledging some of the current events everyone was paranoid about at the
time (the anonymous letter Edmund plants to frame Edgar might have given people flashbacks to one
that revealed the plot to Parliament in time for it to be stopped.) The two very
different versions of Lear in quarto and folio form are also discussed,
changes which might have been made as the parameters of what was and wasn't
appropriate to be staged changed.

There's also a little-known story of an alleged assassination of James I, a rumour
that spread with amazing speed throughout the country and sounds uncannily like the
many false celebrity death rumours that make the rounds nowadays. Overall I found
much interesting stuff here, especially since, as Shapiro points out in the opening,
people seem less interested in exploring Shakespeare as a Jacobean playwright
despite the fact that his company had a much closer relationship with James than with his
predecessor.

Tuesday, 15 March 2016

David Mitchell's (not that one) The Bone Clocks has some similarities to his
most famous book Cloud Atlas, although it's got a more linear structure than
the Russian doll format of that novel, and its story takes place over a single
lifetime: That of Holly Sykes, who narrates the first segment as a teenager in the
1980s, and the final one as a grandmother in the 2040s. In between we have multiple
other narrators, all of whom have some connection to Holly, whether it be a
significant one or fleeting.

As well as following a human life from a distance, The Bone Clocks also has a
supernatural element that reveals itself more and more as the story goes on: Holly
is caught in the middle of a centuries-old war between two species of immortals, one
group nicknamed Carnivores, who kill to maintain their own eternal youth, and the
other calling themselves Horologists, who are eternally reincarnated while
remembering all their previous lives, and who are determined to wipe out the
murderous Carnivores.

It may have taken me a while but this was probably my favourite Mitchell book since
Cloud Atlas, and it also seems to take place in the same universe as all his
other books, including his dire warnings about a post-industrial future (assuming
the penultimate Cloud Atlas segment in a high-tech future could have been
taking place only in China, while the rest of the world succumbed to the events of
The Bone Clocks.) I think strict literary fiction fans might be a bit
nonplussed at how the gentle suggestions of the supernatural turn into full-on
fantasy for the 2020s part of the story, but for me the personal stories were
interesting (even when some of the narrators are far from sympathetic) and the
fantasy element effectively blended into the more naturalistic framework.

Monday, 8 February 2016

As something of a break from the various urban fantasies I've been reading lately
(and because it was discounted on Kindle, my usual reason for trying anything I
hadn't already planned on buying,) I thought I'd give Jonathan Harvey's venture into
comic novels a go. Harvey is course the playwright best known for Beautiful
Thing, although for the last several years his day job has been as head writer
on Coronation Street. And that informs the story of All She Wants,
about a soap star whose career goes on the skids early on in the book, before we
flash back to her earlier life in which all she ever wanted was to star in the
Liverpool-set soap filmed near where she grew up. It's funny, although its story is
every bit as soapy and random as those its lead character has to act in, and the
attempt to add a more serious side with a wife-beating storyline feels a bit glib in
the circumstances.

Monday, 25 January 2016

Paul Cornell is another Doctor Who writer to launch a book series about a
section of the Metropolitan Police dealing with the supernatural; presumably Ben
Aaronovitch hasn't taken it as encroaching on his territory since he provides the
cover quote. And London Falling suggests a different enough approach that it
can happily enough coexist with the Rivers of London series - there's a bit
of a darker, nastier edge to this book that's closer to the Mike Carey Felix
Castor books that I still miss.

Here the team is a four-strong one that comes together largely by accident when a
long-running undercover operation comes to an abrupt end, the crime boss they've
spent years trying to take down dying suddenly in a supernatural (and very grisly)
way. While investigating the death the head of the operation, two undercover
officers and an intelligence analyst end up acquiring, for reasons they still
haven't found out by the end of the first book, psychic powers that allow them to
see into the supernatural underside of London.

It took me a while to get used to the way Cornell jumps between his four leads as
point-of-view characters every couple of pages, but the story (featuring a curse on
anyone who scores too many goals against West Ham) builds well, and kept me keen to
go back to it. But it's probably the fact that Cornell manages at least two HUGE
moments of pulling the rug out from under the reader that'll ensure me checking out
the rest of the series.

Saturday, 9 January 2016

I really should try to remember, when I'm browsing books at various times of the
year, that I like to have a ghost story (or collection of them) to read over
Christmas. As it happens this year I already had one waiting on my Kindle so
Christopher Golden's Snow Blind it was. The novel proved just right for the
job, not exactly a traditional ghost story but with just about the right balance of
darkness and hope.

It's set in a New England town that's used to snowstorms every winter but two,
twelve years apart, prove particularly deadly. The first few chapters take place
during the first storm, which claims a couple of dozen lives. Most of the book takes
place twelve years later though, when the approaching second storm also brings with
it some of the people who died in the first. There's a traditional ghost but most of
them possess the body of someone living, with a warning that the storm contains an
evil supernatural force, the real reason for the high casualty rate.

I thought the book nicely set up the various groups of characters, each of whom
loses someone in the first storm only to have them come back in the second, with not
all the returnees necessarily being welcome visitors. So there's plenty of people to
feel invested in as they try to stay safe from the ice creatures, and maybe even
save their loved ones' ghosts from their limbo state.

Monday, 4 January 2016

The year is 5343 but Christmas street decorations are still those big bulbs made up of
lots of little white lights, that turn up in high streets looking slightly tattier
every year. Also, there's Christmas tree bulbs instead of planets in the opening
credits NOW LET US NEVER SPEAK OF THIS AGAIN.

"The Husbands of River Song" by Steven Moffat, directed by Douglas
Mackinnon.Spoilers after the cut.

Tuesday, 22 December 2015

Daniel Handler is better known as children's author Lemony Snicket, but has also
published a few books under his own name. Before the Series of Unfortunate
Events came his 1995 debut novel The Basic Eight, whose story is a bit of
a high school transposition of The Secret History and Fight Club. It
takes the form of a journal by San Francisco high school senior Flannery Culp, who's
gone back to re-edit it for publication from the prison cell or mental hospital room
she's ended up in a year or so later. So it's made clear from the start that she and
the other members of the Basic Eight, a pretentious clique, will end the story with
murder, and she even lets us know in advance who the victim will be.
The unlikeable, delusional narrator device extends to Flannery pointing out to the
reader when she's using literary devices like foreshadowing, dramatic irony and
pathetic fallacy, and ending each chapter with a list of discussion topics and
useful vocabulary. I found it generally enjoyable, although the plot feels
well-trodden and Handler's use of barely-disguised real names for public figures
(post-notoriety, Flannery's nemesis is talk show host Winnie Moprah, and she'll be
played by actress Rinona Wider in the TV movie) was a bit twee for me.

Wednesday, 9 December 2015

Writing under a pseudonym must do wonders for J.K. Rowling's writer's block, because
unlike the big gaps we used to get between Harry Potter books, the Cormoran
Strike crime novels she writes as Robert Galbraith have been coming out pretty
regularly. The series is in part Rowling's way of talking about the weirdness of
fame, and where the first two books saw the private detective solve cases involving
famous people, in Career of Evil it's his own fame thanks to those cases that
kicks everything off: A serial killer with a Blue Öyster Cult fixation has made it
very clear he or she has a particular beef with Strike, who thinks his recent
appearances in the papers have stirred up someone from his past with a grudge. And
since his past was in the military police, he can come up with a decent shortlist of
suspects just off the top off his head.

The book opens with Strike's assistant Robin receiving a severed leg as a special
delivery, but despite early word being that this was the goriest of the novels so
far, I'm not sure it quite overtakes The Silkworm's ritual eviscerations. The
creepiest element is probably Robin delving into the world of acrotomophilia,
investigating people either attracted to amputees or, particularly in this case,
people who want to have their own limbs amputated. Having lost a leg in the Middle
East, Strike is unsurprisingly unsympathetic, particularly to a very odd couple they
meet during their investigation. Despite a fairly small pool of suspects this is
another good mystery with a few red herrings and perilous moments - this being
someone happy to kill off dozens of characters in a children's series, you can
certainly imagine Rowling wouldn't hesitate to get rid of one of her popular leads
in a grisly adult series.

Monday, 7 December 2015

So after Doctor Who Series 9's only single-part story we go into a concluding
three-parter, but a stealth one, a bit like "Utopia" was a stealth way to
reintroduce the Master. In this case it's the Time Lords who are reintroduced, and
they're grumpy about... something, because the Time Lords are always grumpy about
something.

Tuesday, 17 November 2015

I've got so used to this series of Doctor Who being made up of two-parters I
wasn't really prepared for this week's to be a standalone. I'm still not convinced
next week's apparently unrelated episode won't turn out to be some sort of sequel
after all.

"Sleep No More" by Mark Gatiss, directed by Justin Molotnikov. Spoilers after the cut.